Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of the common general knowledge in the field.
There is a commercial and organisational demand to identify objects/articles for the purposes of facilitating transactions such as point of sale and administrative functions such as stock-takes. An ID system can be required to facilitate the tracking of an item through a process or system. For example, within the military and law enforcement agencies, there is a need to rigorously account for and track items that would pose a serious threat to the public, or would seriously compromise the effectiveness of these agencies should they be possessed by terrorists, criminals or opposing military forces.
In the past this need has been met by:                plain language;        barcodes; and        Radio Frequency Identification (RFID); and        tags applied to the item of interest.        
Known systems for marking of an object include:                generic identification of the type of object as belonging to a group or family; and        explicit identification of an object within a group of the same type by use of a serial number.        
In some known systems both of these forms of identification are used, i.e., the tag provides the item's nomenclature and also provides a serial number that is unique amongst that item's population, either globally or within the company or organisation within which that item is held.
There is often a need, with computerised databases, to use a unique serial number to enable unique identification of an object, object type and object provenance.